"Practical Universal Business Language Deployment" (formerly titled "Practical Use of UBL Artefacts") overviews the OASIS Universal Business Language (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/) suite of publicly-available files, process and methodology descriptions, deployment strategies and documentation from a technical perspective of the roles that all these artefacts play in information systems and how to work with each artefact with hands-on experience.

UBL is the product of an international effort to define a royalty-free library of standard electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and invoices. Developed in an open and accountable OASIS Technical Committee with participation from a variety of industry data standards organizations, UBL is designed to plug directly into existing business, legal, auditing, and records management practices, eliminating the re-keying of data in existing fax- and paper-based supply chains and providing an entry point into electronic commerce for small and medium-sized businesses.

The second day overviews the customization of UBL in detail, including the conception, specification and deployment of subsets and extensions of UBL document models and schemas. Also included is creating your own non-UBL documents using the UBL library and adding non-UBL constructs to existing UBL documents. Hands-on exercises walk the student through the creation of conformant subset UBL schemas and validating instances with those schemas.

This is a course supporting the deployment and use of UBL artefacts, but this is not a course in the interpretation of specific UBL information items in a business context or the adaptation of financial systems to the semantics expressed by UBL.  The instructor is not in a position to offer financial or legal advice regarding the application or suitability of UBL to any particular scenario or purpose.

Hands-on exercises are provided in a turnkey fashion for a Java-based environment under either Windows command-line or Linux shell invocation.  Students may use any editing tool they wish for modifying the exercise files when completing the exercise objectives. Customization exercises on the second day are run on top of OpenOffice 3 using the Crane-UBLProfile software available in class.

Attendees of the second day are encouraged to bring their customization requirements to class to exercise the concepts and tools with their own objectives in mind. Students will be creating customized subset schemas and associated documentation in class using the software tools provided as part of the curriculum.